Nelda Balch was a complete professional (letter)

Like everyone who knew Nelda Balch at all well, I was greatly saddened to hear of her recent death.

She and I came to Kalamazoo College at the same time, in 1954, and I was almost immediately aware that here was the complete professional, perhaps the best example of that vanishing breed with whom I had the privilege of working with in almost a half-century.

The plays that Nelda chose to present were never chosen because of their political correctness, ideological purity or any other extraneous factor. Nor were they selected because she hoped by putting them on to change the world, redeem mankind, bring about social justice or any other of those high-sounding yet all but meaningless abstractions that became so fashionable in the 1960s and '70s.

Whether the playwright was Henrik Ibsen or August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw or Bertolt Brecht, Nelda always had two principle criteria in mind in making her decision: that their play represented the best possible theatrical work and that it offered the maximum opportunity for undergraduate actors to take on roles they could handle with skill and assurance.

Thanks to her capacity for getting the best out of those undergraduate actors, a whole generation of outstanding performers — among many others I remember particularly Marge May and Abe Ash — bore the imprint of Nelda's remarkable way with actors. While I was in no way an outstanding performer, I had the privilege of participating in two of the readers' theater presentations where she worked her skill with members of the "K" faculty rather than undergraduates.

Nelda set such high standards that outside her productions, very few of which I missed over many years, my wife and I found only a handful of local theatrical performances that we cared to attend. Without any exaggeration, that was true as well of New York productions. Not that New York professional theater has ever amounted to very much, but pre-Nelda we had always taken in one or two performances on our annual trip to the city. Thanks to Nelda, all that changed to the point where at least twice during the 1980s and '90s we were unable to find a single play that we had reason to believe we would wholeheartedly enjoy.

Of all the people with whom I taught over the course of a half-century, I can think of none who did more to shape my understanding of and pleasure in an important dimension of aesthetic experience.